Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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Although the title gives the game up, this book is like a perfume whose opening notes of neroli and lemon give way to something uncomfortable and off-putting, like strong imortelle. In the first third, helped immeasurably by his knowledge of Greek, Durrell is getting settled in, and it's a sort of Cypriot Under a Tuscan Sun. The chapter in which he buys a house aided by the wonderfully cunning Turk Sabri is alone worth the price of admission. He is a memorable character. Memorable enough to be eulogized in the New York Times, of all places. Sabri died only in 2000, apparently gunned down.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus - Lawrence Durrell - Google Books

The slender chain of trust upon which all human relations are based is broken -- and this the terrorist knows and sharpens his claws precisely here; for his primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits."

TuCy VS GrCy, right-wing GrCy VS left-wing GrCy, divided like cancerous cells, 2 multiplied by 2 equals 4. and 4 by 2 =8 and so on. After moving a few times among other Mediterranean islands, he comes to Cyprus, which was a British colony from 1925. He takes work teaching English in a gymnasium and later as a public relations officer for the British government. The book covers a few years leading up to the Cypriot freedom movement. It captured the life and changing political mindset of the people well, from which I felt was an unbiased point of view. It became a bit dry somewhere along the way, but that can't be helped considering it had to delve into history. The writing reminded me of Ruskin Bond from time to time, which I liked. Gasp! Oh! Greeks were let to keep their own religion and freedom and language and even local government! How can that be? It must be only because Turks did not have a superior culture to enforce upon others. Seriously, Mr. Durrell? This is how you read the political situation at the Mediterranean or at any place? Turks didn't impose their culture, language and religion upon others forcibly –unlike British- just because they'd assumed what they had was not worthy of imposing? Your friends must find your firm faith in human modesty quite refreshing, I am sure. The nerve of the clueless imperialist who readily accepts the first explanation that comes to his mind, off the top of his head.) Cyprus, 1953. As the island fights for independence from British colonial rule, ancient conflicts between Turkish and Greek Cypriots trouble the glittering Mediterranean waters. Into the brewing political storm enters Lawrence Durrell, yearning for the idyllic island lifestyle of his youth in Corfu.

Bitter Lemons - Wikipedia

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will--whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our nature-- and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.” ( p.15, first paragraph of the book) Having said that, this story was an engaging tale of life so far removed as to be in a galaxy far, far away. (My family experienced a similar immersion when we spent a week, without a car, on the island of Crete in the 1990s. Walking, using public transportation, eating and shopping along side the natives gives one a very different perspective than blasting through on a bus, boat, train or plane full of fellow tourists sipping prepared experiences, meals and tours of a locality.) Durrel had been five years in Serbia and really wasn’t sure if he wanted to live in the Mediterranean anymore. He couldn’t afford to live in Athens so the next best thing after that was Cyprus. Decision made he makes his way to Venice to get the boat there. Falling into conversation with a man there, he questions why Durrell wants to go there at all: ‘It is not much of a place’, the man says, ‘Arid and without water. The people drink to excess.’ To Durrell, it sounded perfect.

Lamplight, wine and good conversation sealed in the margins of the day so that one slept at night with a sense of repletion and plenitude, as if one were never more to wake.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads

And so the rest of the book apparently goes, giving Durrell's unabashedly nationalistic sketch of the war of independence in Cyprus. Although the first paragraphs of the book are quite purple, it seemed to promise to deliver the goods on stereotyping Cypriot Greeks, if only, it turns out, because Lawrence Durrell is so British. He settles into a dilapidated villa, and with his poet's eye for beauty - and passable Greek - vividly captures the moods and atmospheres of island life in a changing world. Whether collecting folklore or wild flowers, describing the brewing revolution or eccentric local characters, Durrell is a magician with words: and the result is not only a classic travel memoir, but an intimate portrait of a community lost forever. Did it crossed his mind that Cypriots were not beautiful because they were slaves of races for centuries and centuries, did he realise that Cypriots were indolent because they were illiterate thanks to the dozens of masters they had above them and worst of all the Franks (yes, not the Ottoman Turks; you are surprised, yes, if you read the History of Cyprus you'll realised that Cyprus suffered worse hardships under the (Christian) Franks and Venetians and less under the (Muslim) Ottoman Turks?)

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Lodging with a friend, Panos, he can begin to get a measure of the people and culture. It is idyllic sitting on the terrace drinking wine before heading down to the harbour to watch the ‘sunset melt’. It was with this friend that he truly came to understand the meaning of the word ‘kopiaste’, or Cypriot hospitality. It was also the best way to see if he could really afford to buy a small place to live in. It would be.

Bellapais Journal; Bitter Memories of a Love Affair With Cyprus Bellapais Journal; Bitter Memories of a Love Affair With Cyprus

The timing of this is unfortunate though as this is just as there is growing civil unrest in Cyprus. Students are joining the rebellion and there are small acts of terror from grenades and homemade bombs. The British (as usual) misjudged the situation and made a bad situation much worse. Lawrence Durrell a poet/novelist comes to stay in Cyprus and chooses not a very ideal period and he buys a house near the beautiful abbey of Bellapaix ( meaning beautiful peace in French, ironic isn't it)... Bitter Lemons is a most extraordinary book. As the work of a lyrical travel writer, we first see beauty. And then horror, as the revolt starts to grow. By 1956, when Durrell finally abandoned the island, murder and destruction was everywhere. A true tragedy. But one documented incrementally by a master of lyrical difference, of the slow and imperceptible transformation of things. As a record of normality slipping uncontrollably into chaos, and the failure of politics and administration to even perceive its fate, it is a vital story, a text book even, the crisis being in many ways a precursor to Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Palestine. Sadly it seems that it’s lesson has been largely ignored by the politicians who might just have made a difference to those terrible developments. Being optimistic, one could imagine that an ‘enosis’ is now inevitable. Not union with Greece, but rather the union of the whole of Cyprus with the new Europe, the early undercurrent of whose formation was in reality the force that stirred the crisis of ’55. But undoubtedly the politicians will still rabble-rouse and play off minorities so as to get their snouts closer to the trough. But unlike Mayes, by the 1950's, Durell was a well-known writer, and a man with wartime experience working for the British government. And in 1953, when Durrell moves to Cyprus, the local demands for Enosis, or union with Greece, are becoming increasingly strident. Durrell is politically conservative, and a supporter of the British Empire -- an empire still largely intact in 1953, despite the recent loss of India. He ultimately becomes the colonial government's Press Adviser, as the demands for Enosis become more violent and the rest of the world watches with increased concern.His early chapter about buying a house in Cyprus is easily one of the funniest things I've ever read. It was only in the hours after reading it that I had to reflect that, hang on, this guy sounds like a real jerk. And what of the book’s author? He’s pretty adept at this kind of life – island life. He has a reputation as an island poet. Corfu was his family home, along with other animals. Cyprus seems to be a familiar habitat. But his great achievement is this: he gets close enough to the pull of the Tree of Idleness so as to know it like a native, he speaks it’s Greek, he adopts its Byzantine mannerisms and customs; and yet he can pull away when necessary, both physically (making small but intense journeys around the island) and intellectually (seeing the tides of history, politics and empire washing around its mangrove roots). And that then qualifies this not only as travel writing, but genuinely great travel writing – which is never measured in terms of miles traveled on the map. Travel writing as an intensive journey through differences, in time. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell’s unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule. Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, it is a document at once personal, poetic and subtly political – a masterly combination of travelogue, memoir and treatise. Well, sort of. Lawrence Durrell loves Grecian-ness almost as much as he disparages actual, flesh-and-blood Greeks. He loves classical Greek thought, and certain modern iterations, such as a reverence for the poems of Seferis and Cavafy. But at the end of the day, he's a repulsive reactionary, a proud imperialist, and even though he's smart enough to see all the contradictions of the colonial regime in Cyprus -- the deliberate underdevelopment, the dimwitted little-Englander officials, the way repressive measures invariably give credibility to the anticolonial fighters, an honest respect for the idealism of the Cypriot youth who want freedom -- he still can't escape the notion that an abstract empire is the best steward of his much-adored classical civilization, and like his mentor T.S. Eliot, he far preferred myth to reality. He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation . . . Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles . . . In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.’ Kingsley Martin, New Statesman